Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
job was to oversee the refit of boats as they returned from sea. He had to make sure that each vessel headed back out to sea was fully stocked with food, supplies, and ammunition. Wartime provisions were high-value commodities, and he kept detailed records of everything that he ordered put onto a boat. During this time, he saw the USS Billfish (SS-286) out to sea and the USS Tuna (SS-203) set sail on her ninth war patrol.5
On November 15, 1943, five months after arriving in the Pacific, he received orders to report to Lieutenant Commander Earle C. Hawk aboard the USS Pompon (SS-267). Meeting in a small makeshift office by the barracks, Hawk looked at his file, asked him a few questions, and then made him his assistant engineering officer. The “Peaceful P” had just come back from her second patrol of the war and some of its officers were being reassigned. Hawk also put him in charge of restocking the boat before she headed back out for her third patrol. Since he had taken a radar repair course when he first arrived in Fremantle, Hawk also made him his radar officer.
Boats of the Gato class were the largest submarines in the Allied fleet. At 311 feet, they were as long as a football field. The size was necessary owing to the extremely large patrol areas in the Pacific. A typical patrol could last anywhere from sixty to seventy-five days at sea. The backbone of the American fleet, seventy-seven were built, of which twenty were lost. Like most fleet submarines of the time, the Pompon was named after a marine creature. In her case, it was a small fish found in the brackish waters of the Louisiana bayous. Commissioned on March 17, 1943 at the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company in Wisconsin, she went on to earn four battle stars in nine war patrols, with Paine sailing on the last seven.6
Paine found himself on the bridge on the afternoon of November 29 as the Pompon, with her crew of sixty, quietly slipped out of Fremantle for the shipping lanes of the South China Sea. They had a secret mission: emplace eleven Mark 12 magnetic mines in a corridor near the shallow waters of Poulo Condore off the French Indochina coast. The newly modified mines had just arrived in the Pacific. The Pompon was carrying the latest high-explosive technology of the war.
Hawk had briefed his officers on their mission. Naval Intelligence had homed in on the high-value, narrow corridor weeks earlier. On paper, the US strategy was simple: force as many Japanese vessels as possible out into the deeper waters of the channel using the mines. Once in deep waters, they became vulnerable to Allied submarines. The IJN would then have to divert more minesweepers and escorts into the channel. This would leave shipping operations even more unprotected and exposed in other parts of the open waters around Japan.7
On board with him was an experienced and close-knit group that included Bill Mendenhall, Frank Wall, Ben Franklin, and Carl (Army) Armstrong. A young lieutenant, Walter H. F. (Wally) Wahlin, an experienced officer who had been on the previous patrols, became his tutor. Once at sea, Hawk made Paine the boat’s junior officer of the deck under the watch of Wahlin. Wahlin took him under his wings.
“Suppose a ship appeared suddenly about 15 degrees on the port bow and it was heading right for you, what would you do?” Wahlin quizzed him on his first watch out of Fremantle. Paine thought he had a good answer. “Ring up flank speed and put the rudder left full; head right for him so if we collided it would be our bow in him. I’d sound the general alarm and the collision alarm too, and have the lookouts man the after 20 millimeter gun to clear his bridge and deck as we passed close aboard.”
It was not a bad answer. Still, Wahlin corrected him. “You’d be all right if you did that, but don’t sound the collision alarm; the crew can’t get to battle stations if you’ve sealed the ship up for collision. … If you rammed him, your after 20 millimeter wouldn’t bear, so you’d better get the quartermaster up to man the after gun and have the lookouts open fire immediately with the forward 20 millimeter on his bridge thus confusing his helmsman and making it harder for him to ram.”8 He had found a teacher and friend in Wahlin. He could trust Wally.
He wrote down his new experiences in a wartime journal: ocean refueling in Exmouth Gulf from a torpedoed Dutch tanker; the daunting forty-foot waves of Darwin Harbor; night watch on the pitch-black waters of Lombok Strait, deep in enemy territory; the first crash dive at dawn in the Java Sea; the bone-crushing violence of depth-charging in the Palawan Passage that felt like sledgehammers hitting an immovable object. Other entries were hypnotically blissful: the picture-perfect azure waters and lush mountains of Borneo and Celebes; the tropical beauty of Bali; the majestic volcano of Mount Agung; the silent, moonless night of Lombok Strait.9
They had been patrolling the shipping lanes off the southern coast of Japan for weeks and had not seen a thing. Unlike the German U-boats that hunted the North Atlantic in packs, described by Winston Churchill as a “measureless peril,” US submarines in World War II largely patrolled alone. Like snipers in the sea, their strategy was to lie in wait for weeks for an unsuspecting vessel to come along. By May 1944, the Pompon had silently made her way deep into the enemy waters of the Kii Channel and Bungo Strait, the north and south outlets from the Inland Sea that directly controlled Japan’s access into the open waters of the Pacific. Naval intelligence had given this tactically important area the code name Cello in the greater Japanese coastal area code-named Hit Parade. They were in Japan’s backyard. Such close inshore support usually meant trouble.
On May 30, his submarine made contact with a lone vessel steaming slowly just off Muroto Zaki, a prominent point on the coast of southeast Japan. Lieutenant Commander Stephen Gimber, who had taken over for Commander Hawk, sounded general quarters.10 Paine was on the bridge for the first time as the diving and torpedo-gunnery officer. A clear sonar contact had been made at 8:32 in the morning. For the next twenty-four minutes, they quietly stalked an unsuspecting vessel and slowly maneuvered into firing position. It was a two-thousand-ton troop transport (later identified as the Shiga Maru) that was steaming home from the East China Sea.
By 8:56, they had made their way directly broadside of the convoy and were in good position to take a shot. But they nearly lost their chance. Only two minutes earlier, with no warning, the Pompon had suddenly lost power. Paine’s quick action on the bow planes stabilized the nose and brought the boat back into the correct firing position. With crewmen Paul Stolpman and Whitey Bevill working the forward torpedoes, he was able to confirm the forward tubes ready just in time. Gimber immediately gave orders to fire. Three torpedoes shot out from the bow tubes toward the convoy 2,300 yards out. Ninety seconds later, the transport ship was gone. Gimber wrote in the mission log: “Bulls eye! One hit amid ship and he literally disintegrated, breaking in half and sinking almost immediately. Numerous breaking up noises were heard; in addition, two other explosions which were probably the other torpedoes on the beach.” After the war, Japanese shipping logs revealed that the captain of this vessel had requested to go around the western side of Japan because he believed that there was too much danger from US submarines on the Pacific side. His request had been denied.11
After confirming the kill, Gimber had Paine quickly put the boat into a steep dive and level out at a depth of 100 feet. This standard tactic was usually enough to get the submarine out of immediate danger. But to their bewilderment, a Japanese aircraft quickly found them. Three surface ships zeroed in; two more soon joined the hunt and boxed in the Pompon. The team methodically worked the submarine over, helped in part by the Pompon’s own intermittently noisy portside propeller. The Japanese dropped some sixty depth charges over the next eight hours. Gimber had to use all of his experience to keep his men alive. He repeatedly dove the boat deeper and deeper to evade the charges that rattled the men and the machine. The crew listened for the dreaded sound of water bursting through the superstructure as they sweated it out for the next nine and a half hours, life preservers ready. The deadly game of cat-and-mouse continued all day and through nightfall. The hunters finally gave up when the Pompon was able to play dead. It then quietly slipped away with its batteries nearly drained as nighttime befell the waters.
Naval Intelligence later revealed that the very effective pursuit by the Japanese was one of the first uses in the war of a new magnetic airborne detector. Called the Jikitanchiki, it could locate a submarine hiding as deep as five hundred feet. Paine’s boat nearly became its first victim. The first depth charge dropped by the aircraft had pinned the sub down as ships on the surface